Donald Trump: It's not how great America is but how small its soul has been!

Fake front page by The Boston Globe)

                                     
                             'Education is the art of making man ethical' (Hegel)

As expected, America’s obscene underside is finally about to tap the front door of the White House. Donald Trump’s ascend to American politics, whether or not he is elected to be the President of the United States, is by no means a strange political phenomenon. Those who now see the demonic danger in his approach to American politics seem to have forgotten who actually ‘made’ him during the last ten years or so for what he is now. The very entertainment economy and negligent media did a 'tremendous job' to ‘elevate’ Donald Trump from a business tycoon to a popular politician through a very generous image-building process for what he so audaciously appears today (Read the article 'Donald Trump is American Journalism's Great Failure'). Within the current postmodern economy, enormous profits of his entertainment businesses kept increasing and, understandably, the electronic media fell before his feet though some of the mainstream channels despised him. As recent Panama Papers exemplified, nothing depends on so called mainstream media today. They all are busy with their demand-supply curves and do not care for the 'truth' anymore until truth enters in from the back door like a ghost. The 'expert' critics could properly estimate the risk that Trump's ‘cheap popular image’ could finally have a devastating effect on America’s elitism and its fluent Lincolnian rhetoric. Now that they realized Trump effectively uses, in his public addresses, some kind of grammar 'typical of children aged 11 and under' (read The Independent for the full story), he has come to the very threshold of world’s most powerful position. Within the context of 'age 11 grammar', now he uses the dark ethno-political metalanguage strategies adapted by German nationalism in the mid twentieth century.  What Trump injects to the American soul is the 'guilt' of the surplus enjoyment of consumerism that makes its subjects forget the Discourse of Universality. Within the ease of consumerism, Trump replaces the paternal superego with 'maternal short-circuit to enjoy' by externalizing the depressive and anxious enemy to a far away Islamic-Asian-Chinese-Latin American land. It is also a sort of resuscitation of the Enlightenment myth of some Oriental fantasy that lives in a maximum of distance to the European reality, which can at the same time be close if no 'protective measures' are taken.

This means that Trump's arrival is made of a deep psychoanalytical structure that runs at the very heart of the American unconscious. He screens the background for their exotic fantasy that haunts as a phantasmic 'specter'. A specter, as you know, can very easily cross the inside/outside, alien/familiar or away/close boundaries. By provoking American nationalism Trump easily gains daily popularity and media attention, while making the affairs for the opposition political movement extremely difficult, 'unpredictable' and 'unforeseeable' (for example, Bernie Sander's universality rhetoric did not gain momentum until recently). Symptomatically, Trump displays the unpredictability of a hysteric who obstinately demands acceptance from the bourgeois hierarchy and his weapons are nationalism and exclusion. The pages of modern history prove that confronting nationalism is perhaps the hardest ideological battle that universalism ever comes across. It is through Trump's body that the battered American soul responds to the ever-rising fundamentalism as a political reaction. He has borrowed the language of nationalism to combat those who fight against the American empire from the periphery. As Zizek points out, ‘suicide bombs and terrorist attacks are ‘momentary tastes’ imported for the rich nations from the Third World which experiences such catastrophes every minute of their daily existence. It is true that such reactions can traumatize American existence and threaten their enjoyment but it also creates the play-ground for postmodern politicians  such as Donald Trump. It's no astonishment that Trump unconditionally represents that entertainment oriented obscene underside of American decadence which essentially demands an enemy. Not that Trump is simply politically ‘illiterate’ but 'over-literate' in successfully generating a discourse of fear (Sri Lankan example would be Wimal Weerawansa). Americans will take another thirty years or more to understand how politically ‘illiterate’ their society had been to give the rise to the 'return of the repressed' in the name of Donald Trump (as Obama claims many politicians now use the language of hatred and exclusion but only Trump gets highlighted. In that sense, this trend represents generalized perversion) . 

At least some ten years ago Jurgen Habermas saw that, from within the American society, fundamentalism radically surfaces as a self-defense against the uncertainty and cultural upheaval triggered by capitalist modernization. He says, ‘what is more surprising is the political revitalization of religion at the heart of the United States, where dynamism of modernization unfolds most successfully’.  Modern secular tendencies have finally erupted into its opposite, the radicalized postmodern religion at both ends of the world.  Subsequently, the rational inheritance of the modern European civilization is challenged by irrational violence and Mr. Trump cunningly represents the irrational totalitarian potential that emerges within the liberal framework of modern American society.  The real patriarchal question is whether the liberal democracy can prevent him becoming the President of United State of America?  To quote Habermas, ‘religious tradition appear to continue with undiminished strength, washing away or at least leveling the thresholds hitherto assumed to pertain between ‘tradition and ‘modern’ societies’. Within his modern secular outfit, Mr. Trump places himself between above division, seeking the shelter in pre-modern values such as ‘religion exclusion’ and ‘Wall Theory’ to protect the so called modern life-world spoiled by consumerist fetishism. What Trump displays through his image is the very fetishist commoditization that all the Americans dream of. Now they have an exemplary figure who succeeded in materializing the very American Dream! They should not worry about the fact that their billion-dollar baby model is  not only politically 'illiterate' (cunningly 'hyper-literate' as Baudrillard says) but a specter that emerged from within their unconscious underside.

Trump provides the ‘surplus-enjoyment’ that Americans unconsciously need at this postmodern hour. It is the 'illusion' of an enemy that is structurally necessary for the truth to arise (Gabriel and Zizek 2009); the truth is the failure of capitalism. For this illusion to be real, now Trump has found out just not one enemy but multiple of them such as Islamic fundamentalism, Mexican drug dealers, Middle Eastern migrants, Chinese entrepreneurs and Asian labor force etc. (those who are ‘not’ Americans).  The ideology of ‘externalization of enemy’ has qualified him to be the 'first totalitarian leader' in modern America.  His master discourse is successfully resuscitating a false enemy for the American to believe in and combining both the ‘exterior’ and ‘interior’ of the dialectic which can sustain its temporal harmony, for instance, to protect ‘us’ (our economy and society) from ‘them’ (Muslims, Chinese and Mexicans). Can Trump be intelligent enough to see that he has forgotten the borderline concept that creates the spatiality between the above two?  The world is divided into two stable oppositions (light and darkness) and the existential recognition of the enemy is defined against ourselves. The Hegelian dialectic of inter-subjectivity always claims that inner harmony is achieved through a paradoxical (re)position of both inside and outside within the same horizon. The moment that you lose the 'other' is the moment that you lose yourself. America has always been America because of its melting pot that welcomes the Other. Trump is truly against its authentic upbringing of melting down differences and sheltering everyone under the master signifier called American Dream or American Values or way-of-life. What Trump propagates is anti-Americanism at its very best. The true enemy of America has emerged not from China, Latin America or Middle East but from within its damaged liberal capitalist soul itself. When commodity fetishism becomes the material existence, nationalism becomes the spiritual aspect that gives life to capitalism.

There is always an ‘extimacy’ between two competing opposites, for examples, Chinese businessmen and American entrepreneurs. One end depends on the other and both opposites need the recognition of the other. According to Schmitt, ‘The political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly; he need not appear as an economic competitor, and it may even be advantageous to engage with him in business transactions. But he is, nevertheless, the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specifically intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible. . . . Only the actual participants can correctly recognize, understand, and judge the concrete situation and settle the extreme case of conflict. Each participant is in a position to judge whether the adversary intends to negate his opponent’s way of life and therefore must be repulsed or foughtin order to preserve one’s own form of existence’ (Schmitt: 1996: The Concept of the Political).  We always maintain an externalized intimate-ness with what is excluded from our existence. At the same time, whatever is excluded (Jews, Tamils, Muslims or Chinese businessmen) from the present moment always 'returns' in a spectral presence in future.  Hence, the enemy is not always evil but an 'ex-timated' instrument that sustains a necessary form of dialectic existence (Jaws by Steven Spielberg). Though Trump may not hear anything rational during his race towards American neo-totalitarianism, let's hope he and the corrupted American souls that follow his command ('enjoyment of the Leader') may understand this basic Hegelian truth before his Presidency and before making America great again!  

Though The Boston Globe was radical enough to publish a mocking front page on the demonic rise of Donald Trump, it is really enough to stop him coming in and snatching the world's most powerful position? So far Donald Trump the tycoon have been able to be influential in almost all the media outlets in America and even those who still believe in universal values find it difficult to avoid him. His campaign mainly targets the anger, rage, racial politics and disappointment of working class people based on also how the system does not address the true needs of the public (read The Guardian report). Doesn't this 'Habermasian moment' represent the failure of the very bourgeois political project itself? Doesn't he paradoxically offer the very Zizekian 'enjoyment' that all the Americans were waiting for? In that context, this symptom surely evidences that his project (as his slogan claims) is not 'to make American great again' but to unearth how miniature its soul has been during these postmodern times...As far as the Americans are concerned that 'revelation' can also be 'a true political act' resulted from Donald Trump contingency.

Before concluding this essay, let's listen to what a Mexican-American 'enemy' had to say some 40 years ago.
         
                   'Let the children have their way
                    Let the children play...
                    Let the children play' (Carlos Santana)

                                                                                                                                                               Cartoon from New York Times                                                                                                                                                                  

Butler, R. (2005) Slavoj Zizek: Live Theory. London & New York. Continuum.

Gabriel, M., Zizek, S. (2009). Mythology, Madness and Laughter: Subectivity in German Idealism. London & New York. Continuum.

Frank, T. (2016). Millions of Ordinary Americans Support Donald Trump. Here's Why. in The Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/07/donald-trump-why-americans-support.

Habermas, J. (2000). Religion in the Public Sphere. in European Journal of Philosophy. London. Polity.

Schmitt, C. (1996). The Concept of the Political. London. Routledge.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-elections/donald-trump-uses-language-typical-of-children-under-11-a6936256.html

http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/media/273583-donald-trump-is-american-journalisms-great-failure.
                                                                                                                                   

                                                                                                                                     Mahesh Hapugoda